It's beyond frightening; it's fucking terrorism. So are we back to “cleaning up” by the Klan?

See – this is the kind of shit that actually makes me want to buy a gun, and I can't stand the fucking things.

Thanks for posting! I'm spreading the word as fast as I can!

Spike Lee's “When the Levees Broke,” was the first national documentary to contain an interview of Darnell Herrington.

Michael Eric Dyson wrote about it in his book, Hell or High Water, and spoke of it in a Democracy Now! interview on March 6, 2006.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk in the book about what was happening to people in New Orleans. You have a quote of Darnell Herrington, a Katrina survivor. Talk about what happened to him.

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Yeah, well, this young man, and I’ve met—he’s just amazing young man, 26 years old, and a quite gifted rapper, as well, but he’s a worker down there, and he’s walking, and suddenly he feels burning in his chest and realizes he has been shot by buckshot in the front from his neck down, on his chest. He falls on the ground, rises back up to try to walk again and is shot in his back. Remarkably, he survives. His cousin runs off. He goes to several houses trying to get help. They turn him down, mostly white people. He saw a black man. He tried to go to him for help. The black man said, “Come on in,” but there was a white woman in this house that said, “You’ve got to get out of here. I can’t help you.” He had to go back out. He saw two white gentlemen in a truck. He went up to them. “Please, please, help me.” They used the N word on him and said, “We’re liable to kill you ourselves, so get out of our faces.” Then he found a white woman in a house, I think with a black family, who took him in and who lied—because the guys who had shot him came looking for him, and they lied and said he wasn’t there.

AMY GOODMAN: And who had shot him?

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: These two white gentlemen, and they were trying to get the N—you know, trying to get the Negros—I don’t know if we can use that word on your show, trying get them out, and they said, “We are trying to kill these black people,” because the media had drummed up the notion that these black people were anarchic and down here doing all devastating manner of things. So the reality is, is that the media, ironically enough, celebrating its own self, patting its own self on the back for being libratory, had reinforced some of the prevailing stereotypes about black people down there. As it turns out, only ten people were dead, only one from homicide, not this 200 and 300 people we thought, not young people raping seven-year-old babies and so on. I’m sure rape, which is an underreported crime under any condition, certainly occurred there. So I’m not dismissing that, but not to the degree that was suggested and not with the kind of barbaric intensity that was prefigured in the media.

So, this white guy—these white guys were saying, “We are getting rid of the niggers, and that’s what we are doing, and we’re looking for this guy,” and they shot him. And his story is quite remarkable because there are many more stories like that that didn’t come to the fore, although I think the major racial response was not of that ilk; it was of the ilk that said, you know, the same racial framework that allows us to look for Natalie Holloway when she disappears, but when Tamika Houston disappears there’s nobody looking for her, that’s the same racial framework. It’s a collective unconsciousness, a set of racial cues that suggests what’s important, what’s not important, who should looked at, who should not be looked at.

I think if a nation of—a camera full of Barbara Bushes were down there drowning in New Orleans, it’s not that the incompetence of the government could have been in any way tamped down upon immediately, but they might have tried harder, and I think that’s the issue of race in this particular situation. The black people did not spawn an intuitive response by either the government—and this is a Southern racial narrative to me. Michael Brown from Oklahoma, George Bush, Texas-bred, black people from Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. It’s a southern racial narrative playing itself out on a global stage.

I think we saw the vicious politics of the collective racial imagination of the South, which has no tolerance, as one historian put it, either for black pain or black suffering on the one hand or black agency or success on the other. Both of them are obliterated in the Southern imagination, and we saw that down in Hurricane Katrina.

So finally, The Nation is dealing with this? Not a cover-up per se…just a slowpoke attitude towards anything having to do with New Orleans. I heard and read that there had been revenge killings among gangstas, but also among cops seeking payback, and marauders described by Herrington. Worse yet, security organizations like Blackwater had been called into New Orleans by the rich to protect themselves and they arrived WAY before the soldiers came into the city to restore order. There were stories by witnesses who saw blacks being rounded up and herded into trucks, ostensibly to take them to safety, and if someone objected, they were shot. There were also women who were raped in the general chaos.

All of this was happening while the Media were informing us how black folks were looting, and had our minds focused on what was happening at the Convention center & Super Dome. Notice how the Media described blacks as “looting” & whites as “getting food for survival”?! The horror that was happening to innocent blacks being gunned down by whites b/c they were blacks…. were more dangerous than the storm. And it's still being covered up! OMFG!

Sounds like something right out of the movie “Betrayed” where blacks were hunted down and killed for sport! Jesus Christ!

George Malik Abdul-Mahdi

Jill, I had the great pleasure to meet you briefly at NetRoots Nation, at which time I also saw a Katrina documentary where a clip exists of Navy officers telling black Katrina Survivors to go away at gun point instead of provide shelter and food. Not vigilantes, not local racist police, but federal military. Perhaps you and others have seen the clip, but i will try to find it.

In any case, will spread word to all I know. This needs a full investigation at the very least, and so much more beyond that.